I’ve barely made any rogue posts lately. I haven’t played the rogue much. I’ve been passing up my raid spots so that others could get geared, and I’ve mostly been working on gearing my prot pally (who is now about ready to tank early Ulduar).

So, what’s up with rogues these days?

The big Patch 3.3 that includes Icecrown, a new LFG system, T10 gear, and our final confrontation with Arthas is coming soon. As has been the norm with patches in WotLK, there are not a lot of significant rogue changes announced. Mostly they are looking to make little gameplay tweaks without major alterations in what we do.

Improved Poisons now increases the chance to apply Deadly Poison to your target by 4/8/12/16/20%. (Up from 2/4/6/8/10%)

Deadly Poison now has an additional effect – Once stacked to 5 times, each application of Deadly Poison also causes the poison on the Rogue’s other weapon to apply.

The first change seems to be a little bump to Mutilate dps to keep up with Combat. The second is Blizzard’s way of eliminating weapon-swapping as a useful tool. For those who are not weapon-swapping, this will be a buff. For those who were swapping, it seems like this should essentially keep your damage the same but without the need to swap. And so ends the brief life of the PoisonSwapper add-on.

This is presumably put in place so that rogues won’t take a hit in DPS on Icecrown mobs that don’t fit into one of the original categories. As a flat 4% dps increase this will now be a mandatory talent. In the past, a rogue might spec out of that in Naxx, for example, because it had no effect on dps vs. undead, and use those talent points elsewhere.

Filthy Tricks now reduces the cooldown of Preparation by 1.5/3min. (Down from 2.5/5min)

This is part of the trend toward reducing cooldown times across all classes, but it has no real effect. Formerly a pvp rogue with the standard subtlety talents had a 5 minute cooldown on Prep (10 min base minus 5 min from Filthy Tricks). Now it will still be 5 minutes (8 min base minus 3 min from Filthy Tricks). The reason for this is that the new arena rule that says that abilities with a 10 minute or longer cooldown cannot be used in Arenas. Thus, by changing Prep to an 8 minute base cooldown is is still an arena talent.

As always, these changes are tentative, pending PTR testing. Nothing is final until the patch drops.

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6 Responses to “Summary of Rogue News in Patch 3.3”

o_O I didn’t hear anything about the boost to poison applications. Great for us Mutilate Rogues… I have noticed Combat is still ahead when it comes do DPS on almost every fight and hopefully now we’ll be able to show them how it’s done.

I see your point, Stonedrake. However, I also subscribe to the daggers-only approach. My D&D background influences that, I’m sure.

Thus far I still out-dps the combat rogues in my guild, and I was not weapon-swapping. That’s due to experience (150+ days /played on my rogue) and my comfort level with the assassination spec abilities. Still, a buff is always welcome.